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Episode 131: A Case of the Mondays

First off, I apologize for this first and likely only time we have the country-naming Manowar. Granted we don’t play a song, but still. Anyway, we have a full episode five album reviews with some jams for 60% of them. We also share and discuss a wide range of news from the sad to the unfortunate to the strange.

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A tech death band that has choruses you can remember? You obviously need to listen to more Allegaeon. Nick said if a band can do that it would be his album of the year. Formshifter was my album of the year from 2012. Allegaeon’s best chorus probably isn’t even on that album. Try “Accelerated Evolution”, the last song on Fragments of Form and Function. And that song has an unbelievable guitar solo in the middle.

I actually don’t mind at all that the Mayhem bands aren’t any good because that tour doesn’t ever play in NYC so I’m not missing anything anyway (Jones Beach is too far away and I’d need a car to get there).

And not to disappoint you, here we go with Manowar:

Kings of Metal puts the power in power metal. This is probably one of the all time best power metal albums. You talked about the lack of good choruses in tech death? The choruses on Kings of Metal are HUGE! “Hail and Kill” and “Blood of the Kings” are two incredible songs with choruses that stand up (to me) to some of the all time best metal songs. And “Heart of Steel” is an amazing ballad that really hits a chord (figuratively) with me. It sounds cliched to say that Manowar’s music can “pump you up” but I can’t avoid being cliched when talking about Manowar.

Now as for the recently released re-recording, it is superfluous at best. As you mentioned, the original album actually sounds good and is produced well. You could argue that the production on the re-recording actually sounds worse. When Manowar released it in 1988 they were able to use decent recording technology. Kings of Metal is different from their first album, Battle Hymns, which they re-recorded a couple of years ago. Battle Hymns was originally recorded on a shoestring and the production sounds quite “thin”. But the original recording of Kings of Metal sounds great. So why re-record it? I have no idea. Maybe they wanted to erase the memory of the misogynistic song “Pleasure Slave”, which is on the original but not on the re-recording.

I know I’m probably going to lose further respect for this next statement, but believe it or not I don’t have that childhood nostalgia about Manowar. I didn’t listen to Manowar 20 years ago. I only discovered them after reading Martin Popoff’s book “Top 500 Metal Songs” which came out around 2004 and I didn’t buy it until a couple of years later. One of my takeaways from that book was to check out some of the songs I’d never heard before, of which a couple of Manowar songs such as “Hail and Kill” was on the list. I had no idea who the band was at that time. I had no preconceived notions of their music or their image. So just based on “blind” listening to a few Manowar songs, I knew I wanted more. I have since gone on to embrace the over the top chessiness of the band, but I did not know about that at the time I first discovered their music. And as with a lot of bands, seeing them live is a transcendent experience. Concert-goers (they call them “Manowarriors”. How’s that for ya?) randomly start chanting “Hail and Kill” all night long. There’s a real sense of camaraderie at a Manowar show where we’re all “Brothers of Metal” who are “fighting for metal”. Yes, I know it sounds cheesy but it sure is a lot of fun.

Now you’ve doomed yourself by saying that if you are a band that is better than Manowar to send your music in. No one is going to send anything now!